This year is my 20 year high school reunion.  Unbelievable.  Sadly, I won't be able to go, but I have had fun catching up with some old classmates online.  Imagine my surprise when I learned that one of them is a homeschooling mother and writer with a children's fiction series about to be published whose focus is homeschooling on the road in an RV!

Lisa Cottrell-Bentley lives in Arizona and is an unschooler.  She and her two daughters spent many hours searching for children’s books about homeschoolers, but found very few. So, they decided to create their own. As they discussed their dream storylines, the Wright on Time series took shape.  The first book in the series, Wright on Time - Arizona, is due out this month, with one for each state (except maybe Hawaii) following closely behind.  To learn more about the characters and their RV adventures, visit http://www.wrightontimebooks.com  

I thought the transition to living on the road would be effortless.  The one thing that most people said they couldn't take - never getting away from the kids - I was already living on a regular basis as a homeschooler.  Piece of cake, right?  What I didn't expect was the huge increase in the noise level, dealing with the fact that my kids were bouncing off the walls of the RV unless they got outside daily to burn off some energy (which meant one of us had to go with them), and missing the sense of freedom that comes with having 2 cars.  All of this we learned in the first 3 weeks.  Thus began our journey to somehow reconcile the dream with the reality of life on the road. 

First off, I could not school my children on the road the same way I did at home, and for me that was a great source of frustration (and also an opportunity to grow).  The reality was no where near what I had envisioned.  I thought we would get in-depth, tangible history lessons, full of real-life places and experiences that would really leave an impression.  Instead, we were moving so fast that we ended up with a basic overview of American history.  Not at all what I had hoped for.  It left me discouraged and wondering if the year as a whole would wind up being good for my kids or a colossal waste of time academically.  (Their standardized test scores, thankfully, showed that it was not a waste of time.  They really did learn something on the road!)  In retrospect, to get the type of educational experience we had envisioned we would have had to move much slower and stay on the road much longer...2-5 years.  By moving so quickly we didn't allow ourselves time to rest between cities, time to process what we had learned, or time to really get to know anyone in the campgrounds. Unfortunately, I didn't know that on the front end.  We left too many expenses and obligations at home and our income wasn't keeping up (we were on the road when diesel was close to $5/gal).  We had to get home and get back to work.

In retrospect, here are some of the things that we did right on our journey...

We went.  I know that sounds like a given, but with the obstacles we encountered we could have just given up the dream and stayed home.  Inevitably, when you decide to do something of this magnitude, you're going to question whether you can really do it.  You'll run into things that seem impossible, but spending a year on the road was one of the best decisions we've ever made.  Our family grew closer together; our boys grew less materialistic and more responsible; we learned to value the little things.  It was good.  Very good.

We planned ahead.  Of course, you can't plan for everything, but knowing where we were going sure helped.  I had planned our route, but not exactly where we would stay each night.  That allowed enough flexibility for us to have some direction without feeling too bound by the schedule.  And, it gave me time to look into what each town had to offer before we got there.  I had a file on each city with possible places to see and things to do, including the costs. This made it much easier when we rolled into town.  We also traveled with a GPS...a must-have.

We got National Parks Passes and an annual membership at Boonshoft Museum of Discovery.   The Adventurer membership is very affordable (it was actually given to our family as a Christmas gift) and has a great reciprocal agreement across the country.  It saved us a fortune!

Coming home was strange.  It was almost like we had never left.  We jumped right back into the things we had always done.  I started teaching a 14 week US Geography class for our homeschool support group and the boys picked up basketball, then baseball with the church leagues.  The only truly difficult part was finding work for my husband, but there was no way to predict that our economy would be in such dire straights when we left.  That’s just a chance we took. 

In no time at all we were as busy as we were before we left, and my heart sank, feeling that we hadn’t learned anything, or at least what we had learned hadn’t stuck.  My husband was doing freelance IT work and was gone all the time.  I was ferrying the boys from one activity to the next and spending hours planning and teaching 20 other kids.  We were being sucked back into that same old rut.  It was time to refocus. 

We are now offering our fabulous, family-friendly 2005 Holiday Rambler Ambassador 40 PLQ for sale to the next adventurous group.  It has served us well and we have been very happy with the modifications we made (read about them or see some photos here ).  If you are considering traveling in a motorhome for an extended period of time with children, this is the perfect rig for you!  Contact us for details and more pictures of this one-of-a-kind RV.  We are asking $105,000 OBO.  See our ad on Craigslist.   

We're back.  I know it seems that we've fallen off the face of the earth, but we haven't.  Really.  We've just gotten wound up in the festivities of Christmas and New Years, family and friends.  We are back in Memphis, at least for now.  After being home just a few weeks I now have a women's retreat to help plan and a wedding to decorate in the next 3 weeks.  That's typical for me at home.  Busy, busy.  Funny how we revert to our normal behavior in familiar settings, even when we've determined that we want to do things differently.  I will try to get the site up to date soon, but you'll have to bear with me. 

In the meantime, we are trying to discern our next step.  Dan and I both feel that God called us away from our "normal life" to prepare us for something new...something radically different (as if living in an RV for a year isn't radical!).  This trip was a transition for us.  It was a way for us to let go of what we knew.  We stepped out of our neighborhood, away from our friends and our church and everything familiar and comfortable.  We learned to live with less and be happy, realizing that much of what we had was more of a burden than a blessing.   We learned to depend on each other and work together in a way we never had before.  Also, during the trip God birthed in us a desire to serve Him above all.  We really want to invest our lives in something that we feel has eternal value and we are prepared to leave suburbia for good in order to do it.  We have been asking God where we should go and what we should do.  We have been diligently seeking Him.  We've asked our friends to pray for us.  We've done lots of research.  So...want to know our next move?

So do we!  We're still waiting.  It's so hard for me.  I'd really like to know where we're supposed to go and what we're supposed to do.  Now.  Not to mention the fact that we need another income.  So, while I learn patience and practice trusting God, we all wait.  Let's hope I'm a quick study.